About the Project
Older adults across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire face increasing risks of social isolation, loneliness, and exclusion from community life. These challenges are often linked to declining health, reduced mobility, shrinking social networks, and fewer opportunities to participate in cultural and social activities. Concurrently, the rapid digitalisation of everyday life is creating new forms of exclusion, leaving many older people unable to fully access services, information, and opportunities for social connection. Addressing social isolation and digital exclusion is therefore a regional priority.
Nottingham's rich heritage assets, particularly the City of Caves, offer a distinctive opportunity to explore these challenges. The caves combine significant accessibility barriers with a unique repository of local memory, including experiences of wartime sheltering, work, and everyday life. Rooted in living memory, they provide opportunities for storytelling, creativity and intergenerational exchange that can strengthen social connections and belonging in later life. Digital and immersive technologies offer new ways of widening participation for people who face mobility or transport related barriers.
This PhD will investigate how heritage engagement, including appropriate digital technologies, can support community belonging, social inclusion and reduced isolation among older adults. Working with the National Justice Museum, the City of Caves and Hot Knife Digital Media Ltd, the project will use participatory methods to co-create and evaluate heritage experiences with older residents, ensuring that their memories, identities and lived experiences shape physical and digital forms of engagement while positioning them as active contributors and co-creators rather than passive audiences.
The project addresses an important gap in knowledge. Despite growing interest in healthy ageing, participatory heritage, and digital inclusion, little research has explored how co-created heritage experiences can address social isolation and digital exclusion simultaneously. The project will generate practical guidance, and a transferable framework for age-friendly and digitally inclusive heritage practice, delivering benefits for older residents, local communities, and heritage organisations across the UK.
The research builds on a recent Collaboratory Research Placement undertaken with the National Justice Museum, which explored how immersive and digital technologies can improve access to Nottingham's cave heritage. That work demonstrated that digitally mediated heritage experiences can help overcome accessibility barriers and broaden participation among people unable to access the site physically. The proposed PhD extends these findings by focusing on older adults and examining how co-created heritage experiences can support both social connection and digital inclusion.
This project has been co-created with and is supervised by researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham, and partners at the National Justice Museum and Hot Knife Digital Media Ltd. The successful candidate for this project will be enrolled at Nottingham Trent University.
Project Aims and Objectives
This PhD will investigate how heritage and digital innovation can be used to support healthy ageing, social inclusion, and community belonging among older adults. Specifically, it will:
- Examine the relationships between heritage engagement, social connection and wellbeing for older adults, particularly those experiencing social isolation or reduced mobility.
- Identify barriers and opportunities for participation in heritage activities, including those associated with digital exclusion and accessibility.
- Co-design and evaluate heritage experiences with older adults, ensuring that their memories, identities, and lived experiences shape both physical and digital engagement.
- Explore how digital and immersive technologies can enhance access to heritage where appropriate, while recognising that digital approaches may not be suitable for all participants and identifying when non-digital or hybrid approaches may be more inclusive.
- Develop evidence-based guidance and a transferable framework for age-friendly and digitally inclusive heritage practice for museums, heritage organisations, and community partners.
What is Collaboratory?
Collaboratory is a pioneering research programme, led by Universities for Nottingham and the Leicester Universities Partnership, that places community knowledge and experience at the heart of research. This eight-year initiative is pioneering a new approach to collaboration, working closely with local communities and community-focused organisations to develop and deliver research that addresses the needs and priorities of local communities.
Supervisors
Glyn Lawson (NTU), [contact details available in the full listing]
Chris King (UoN), [contact details available in the full listing]
Gary Holmes (National Justice Museum), [contact details available in the full listing]
Entry qualifications
Collaboratory aims to bridge the gap between academia and communities through a holistic programme of co-created research that actively embeds public groups within its research. As we strive to establish an innovative approach to conducting PhD research, we seek candidates who can demonstrate a deep knowledge of and commitment to Nottingham and Nottinghamshire communities. Prospective candidates should demonstrate the extent to which they meet the project competencies, detailed in the full advert on the Collaboratory website.
